My curiosity about comic artist Steve Ditko peaked about 10 years before Blake Bell's, back when I was working on Comics: Between the Panels. In those days, Ditko's preference for solitude was already legendary, but I wrote him a letter, asking if we could talk about the history of comics and his place in it.

Curiously -- given all that I've seen and read since -- Ditko wrote me back. Although he had no interest in speaking with me, his April 1991 letter was unfailingly polite. And this is how it began:

My not being interested in the history of comics has an unstated corallary (sic): I'm not interested in the history of Steve Ditko.

I have a routine. Early in December I get all the work that I had published that year and spend some time during the month reviewing, reflecting on the work. Near the end of the month I put the material in a package and on a shelf. I am free to start the new year without any baggage from last year.

Seventeen years later, I don't mean to make too much of that full-page letter. At least, I didn't until I began flipping through Bell's new book, Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko from Fantagraphics ... and realized Bell never squeezed a letter out of the reclusive artist, much less exchanged a complete sentence with the man.

I could be wrong about this. I haven't pored over every page of text, but I have combed the end notes, trying to figure out how Bell delivered 220 pages without ever talking to Ditko, who's now 80 years old.

Well ... cut off, apparently, from a first-hand view of the man's life, Bell does what you have to do. He cribs Ditko quotes from 1966 fanzines, Robin Snyder's 1990 letters detailing the history of comics, and a 1998 letter to Comic Book Marketplace. He unearths Ditko's 1976 letter to one Steve Robertson, a snatch of Ditko dialog from The Masters of Comic Art documentary ... and a series of letters Ditko exchanged with Mike Britt ...

... in 1959.

Britt was 14 or 15 at the time, publishing an EC fanzine. He and I live about a mile apart, so I drove over to his house tonight. I showed him my Ditko letter and he showed me his. He also gave me a copy of Squa Tront 11, in which he described his first contact with Ditko:

I got Squatront plugged on the letters' page of Adventures into the Unknown 112, October 1959. I received about six responses, one of them from Steve Ditko!

He was extremely excited to see his first fanzine and said he had no idea that publications like this existed. We exchanged several letters, but even then, so many years ago, Ditko was very guarded and asked that I not print any of his comments verbatim in Squatront. He said I could use the information and anecdotes about other artists from his letters, but not in his words.

Ditko was willing to contribute any art (and articles with the help of Sal Trapani) that I wanted. Because the second issue was just about ready to mail, those contributions would have to wait until the third issue. Steve graciously picked up a few more magazines and comics for me that I couldn't find in Northampton, like Eerie Tales, which had Williamson and Torres stories. He was going to look for ECs that I needed also, but I don't recall if he located any for me. Steve told me he had a bunch of old comics the he was going to throw away and asked if I wanted them. When the carton arrived, it had twenty to thirty comics in it. They were mostly wonderful Fiction House titles (Maurice Whitman was one of his favorites) and some great Avon science-fiction titles like Strange Detective, Strange Worlds and Eerie (all with Wood). A few weeks later another package arrived with more comics, and stats of "Stretching Things" and two other stories done in 1953-54.

While talking to Britt about all this, and staring at those original letters from Ditko, now 49 years old, I felt like I was brushing up against real history. I don't know that I ever feel that flipping through The World of Steve Ditko, even though Bell reprints that 1954 Ditko story, "Stretching Things." It's a great looking book, even though the designer indulges in far too many Chip Kidd tricks, allowing Ditko's pages and cover art to bleed off the margins, but I'm never convinced Bell is offering me all that much in the way of fresh material, fresh interpretation ... or fresh correspondence with a guy who was never sufficiently impressed by his own story to share it with the world.